14 JANUARY 21, 2011 | THE BOSTON PHOENIX | THEPHOENIX.COM
THE FUTURE, ILLUSTRATED
FORGET POLITICIANS, ECONOMISTS, OR INVENTORS -- THE FUTURE OF BOSTON BELONGS TO THE COMICS
_BY TH E B O S TO N CO MI C S ROU N DTABL E
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The Boston Comics Roundtable is a collective of comics artists and writers who've been meeting weekly in Harvard Square since 2006. We approached this future-Boston project as a sort of moderated "jam comic," an improvised group effort in which one cartoonist draws a panel, then passes it off to another who adds
a panel of their own, and so on, usually resulting in a weird, amusing Frankenstein monster of a story. In this case, each cartoonist went off on their own and came up with a scene from the coming century, which we then fit together into a sequence. While we realize that the Boston area is loaded with economists, political scien-
tists, engineers, inventors, city planners, and other highbrow plutocrats who think they have a handle on where society is going, we cartoonists will put our predictions up against anyone's!
To learn more about the BCR, go to bostoncomicsroundtable.com.
2020: boston becomes first city to fully automate tourism.
2030: time travel improves diversity of area colleges. move-in day traffic, not so much.
2040: silver line goes sentient . governor affleck bombards self with gamma rays to deal with problem.
2050: global warming lifts sea levels. little changes for resilient locals.
...very little.
2070: brainy bostonians solve energy crisis with invention of hybrid ostrich. golden era begins.
2080: golden era ends.
2090: mutant archaeologists enslave remaining humans. discovery of ancient warning causes invaders to abandon city.
2100: alien race that founded boston finally returns, awaits report from sentry left behind.